The Defeat of Street Smarts

Claiming to be a religion is but one means of sheltering a
commercial enterprise from accountability. Ambiguity of product is
another.

The legal profession struggles to keep up with questions of
accountability that arise when buyer and seller disagree about the
nature and effect of esoteric services. That problem becomes all the
more difficult when the product is inherently ambiguous, as is the
case with the subjective and possibly manipulated mental state of an
individual. This ambiguity is a legal weak point which Hubbard
recognized, exploited, and further obscured by mixing it with
religion.

By charging money for obscure expert services which are part of a
religion and which have as their product an ambiguous subjective
condition, Hubbard created a sales and recruitment machine virtually
immune from legal accountability.

Special concern for accountability is appropriate when the user of
a service is at a significant disadvantage in relation to the
provider, as is the case with complex medical services. In such cases
the rule tends, properly, to be caveat vendor (seller beware).
The vendor is liable for harm or fraud which the disadvantaged
consumer was not in a position to understand or avert. Thus medical
products and services are subject to extensive governmental,
scientific, and professional review by which the vendor establishes
that he has shown due regard for the consumer's interest and is not
negligent.

Caveat emptor (buyer beware, otherwise known as "street
smarts") may have been sufficient protection for the consumer against
the snake oil salesman. But a new kind of consumer disadvantage must
be considered when an authoritarian, well staffed group, hidden from
public scrutiny, uses sophisticated techniques derived from a
half-century of social science research to manipulate the lay consumer
and thereby secure the purchase, acceptance, and recommendation of an
essentially worthless or even harmful service.

In the legal periphery where cults reside, shrouded by irrelevant
issues of religion, there is no accountability or protection for the
consumer of quasi-medical or self-improvement services. Scientology
has made many claims which could be tested, if those claims were
legitimate -- such as Hubbard's numerous claims for the state of
Clear.

Instead, the group relies on bald assertion of miraculous results,
backed only by success stories written by people in the midst of
intense social pressure -- and on the legal presumption of caveat
emptor.

Scientology fanatically avoids any independent review or
evaluation of its actions. Attempts to establish accountability are
slandered and misrepresented as attacks on religion.

Public scrutiny may sometime occur, however, despite the
Scientologists' best efforts to prevent it. Here is one example
concerning Narconon, a Scientology recruitment program operating under
the guise of drug rehabilitation -- a bid to promote Scientology by
coattailing on an established social issue.

[Narconon NEWS, Volume 6, Issue 3, states, "NARCONON is
freeing people from crime and drug abuse with standard tech, and
starting them up RON'S bridge to total freedom. WHO CAN YOU START
ACROSS THAT BRIDGE?"]

Narconon is based on the Purification Rundown, a detoxification
program developed by Hubbard and promoted through Scientology
organizations. The following assessment of the Narconon program is
dated January 5, 1991, by Dr. James J. Kenney, Ph.D., R.D., a member
of the National Council Against Health Fraud, a group which also
includes former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

I am familiar with the "Hubbard Method" of "detoxification" which
is used at Scientologist run "clinics".... This "purification"
program was created by L. Ron Hubbard's fertile imagination in the
mid-1950s. It is part of the teachings of the Church of Scientology
and lacks any credible scientific support.

This "purification" or "detoxification" program is claimed to help
"clear" the mind of toxins such as drugs, pesticides and chemical
pollutants. It consists of large doses of niacin, vegetable oil,
exercise and "low temperature" saunas. According to the followers of
L. Ron Hubbard, the large doses of niacin work by stimulating the
release of fat into the blood stream and this is accompanied by
various "toxins" trapped in the body's fatty tissues.

According to science, large doses of niacin actually block the
release of fat from fat cells. This has been observed both at
rest [Acta Medica Scandinavia 1962,
172(suppl):641)] and during exercise. [D. Jenkins,
Lancet 1965, 1307]

In other words, the scientific evidence shows the exact opposite
of what Hubbard's theory predicts. There is no credible support for
claims that large doses of niacin clear toxins from the brain, fatty
tissue or any other part of the body. To make matters worse, large
doses of niacin ... can cause serious liver damage ... trigger gout,
raise blood sugar into the diabetic range, cause itching, flushing and
a rash. Nausea and gastritis are other side effects of large doses of
niacin.

To subject people to these potentially serious side effects on the
pretense that they are being "detoxified," "cleared" or "purified" is
quackery.

NCAHF president, William Jarvis, Ph.D., writes,

NCAHF believes that responsible community leaders should reject the
Narconon addiction treatment program. It appears to be among the
least acceptable in a field that already suffers from a lack of sound
objective research.

Sound objective research is not relevant to the true believer. In
place of evidence and scientific validity, things are said to work (in
Scientology) by using social pressures to persuade people that they
did work; i.e., by gradually interfering with the individual's ability
to evaluate information.

The coercion which accomplishes this defeat of "street smarts" may
not be obvious. It would be a pretty ineffective group that had to
control its members through blatant coercion. It is much more
efficient to create a milieu in which the members indoctrinate and
control themselves, and convince each other that it was all their own
free choice and decision. As a cohesive group, they will enforce such
ideas as a condition of friendship and belonging.

We encounter a friendly and enthusiastic group which espouses
goals and values that are easy to agree with. Home at last!

At first, it seems that all we are being asked to agree with is
better communication, getting people off drugs, motherhood, and apple
pie.

What these groups really sell is membership. Sure, they want your
money and your time, and they will take all there is of both. But
what they want above all is for you to be one of them, to belong, to
agree with them, to reassure them by the sacrifice of your own life
and values that their own lives and decisions have not been futile
misguided error.

"Street smarts" is swept away by the person's urgent reliance on
the constant reinforcement required to maintain "certainty those
collective self-deceptions about being an elite in unique possession
of the only right answers. It may be decades before one begins to
realize, or to fight desperately against realizing, that life has gone
by to no constructive effect.

There were some tricks going on that our ordinary schoolyard and
street education failed to teach us about.